When will Trudeau signal his plans for C-51?

If all we knew about the government’s plans on security and anti-terror law was what we heard in Friday’s throne speech, we would know nothing.

Indeed, apart from a subject heading — “security” (twinned unexpectedly with “opportunity”) the brief document mentions only supporting our allies in the fight against terrorism. And there’s a cryptic reference to keeping Canadians safe while protecting “cherished rights and freedoms”.

This will be thin gruel for those huddled over briefs, wondering whether they’ll need to continue their lawsuits challenging the last government’s security laws, such as the citizenship revocation powers and Bill C-51.

Fortunately, we’re in the peculiar position of not needing to read too much into this particular throne speech. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s mandate letters to his ministers signal more detail on the government’s plans in this area, although they inevitably leave some questions unanswered.

We know, for instance, that under the stewardship of the House Leader, the government will proceed with its plan for some kind of parliamentary review body in the area of national security.

This is a big agenda, one that will take time to develop and frame.

We see the minister of Public Safety, in association with the Justice minister, charged with overseeing the repeal of at least some of C-51 (its “problematic elements”). Those ministers also have been instructed to spearhead a new law that “strengthens accountability with respect to national security and better balances collective security with rights and freedoms”. And these two ministers, working with the minister of Citizenship, are to lead the rollback of citizenship revocation laws. The Public Safety minister himself has been told to create an office for a coordinator of ‘community outreach and counter-radicalization’, and to review cyber-security.

This is a big agenda, one that will take time to develop and frame. Just figuring out the roles and responsibilities of a counter-radicalization coordinator in Canada’s messy administrative structure will be a major undertaking. Catching up to the allies and finally investing parliamentarians with serious review functions in the area of national security raises tricky design issues — not least being the question of how to dovetail with existing review bodies in a manner that ‘force-multiplies’, rather than degrades, the net amount of accountability in the system.

Will “strengthened accountability” include reforms to the Communications Security Establishment oversight system — for instance, the controversial ministerial authorization system and metadata collection practices? The actual content of the “problematic elements of Bill C-51” will be fodder for discussion and debate. And that’s before we even start talking about all the things that C-51 failed to do — all the things the Air India inquiry told us in 2010 were urgently needed to keep us safe.

So even with the detail in the mandate letters, much remains to be decided.

These content questions bleed into a process issue; how these matters will be decided is a question mark hanging over Ottawa for those of us who live and breathe this stuff. But in fairness, Kent Roach and I had the luxury of six months and 600 pages to lay out our menu in our book False Security. The current government has been in office just 30 days — and has things to worry about in its massive governance agenda other than satisfying the curiosity of myopically focused professors of national security law.

And so, with no further granularity in the throne speech, we’ll need to await the New Year. That should be just enough time to get through the exam grading and partner with Kent Roach to bash out some more ideas!

Craig Forcese teaches national security law at the Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa and is the author, with Kent Roach, of the recently published False Security: The Radicalization of Canadian Anti-terrorism (Irwin Law, 2015)

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